The man who stared down the Slender Man Chapter 2
by Boilerguru
Summary: My first encounter


June 1983 – My first encounter with the Slender Man (unconfirmed)

The late 1970s and early 1980s were not a great time for my family. My mother (a flake), decided to divorce my father and shacked up with a good for nothing boyfriend. The big bright idea which lead to my encounter with the Slender Man involved the building of a house on Tobias Rd. in Penn Township, PA. If you drove through this area today, you'd think it was in the middle of nowhere – try imaging what this place looked like in 1983. At that time, the housing development on Tobias Rd. was in its infancy. The house that was built by my mother and her drug addict of a boyfriend came from the money he stole from his grandparents (I hated the guy and still do, I'm happy to run him down when I get the chance) and we were basically the first house built on the block that that had kids. Originally we had neighbors on each side of us, and basically one house down the street which wasn't part of the development. The rest of the street was filled with lots and houses in various stages of construction.

This new living arrangement provided my sister with drastic changes to our short lives (I had just finished 2nd grade and she would be entering kindergarten at the start of the next school year). Due to the divorce we had been living with my mom's parents, who were pretty awesome and had a nice, if small house. We were now in a slightly larger house, with no cable TV (13 channels in 1982 was pretty good) – instead we had an aerial antenna and basically 3 channels. I remember one of the channels was channel 49 from way up north in PA – I swear bowling for dollars was the feature program at 7pm. It was like we had moved back to the 1960s.

So, with TV out of the picture, entertainment was pretty much just exploring the area – which was corn fields and wooded areas. One of the first things, and only things, we ever did with my Mom after moving up there was to take a walk to try to find a creek in which to play. We had a pretty good creek in Riverview park that we used to go take walks in all the time, we hoped we could find something similar up in this area. So my sister, Mom, and I all take off on Tobias Rd and head towards the intersection of Plum Creek Rd, Tobias Rd, and Davis Bridge Rd. We had never been across Plum Creek Rd, and wanted to explore beyond what we could see from the car. The first thing you encountered on Davis Bridge Rd was a small farm.

This farm always had a sign out advertising brown eggs. In the 6 plus years I had to be around that area, I never saw anyone buy eggs at that farm and I never saw anyone actually working on that farm. Today, the farm house has been completely redone, but back then it was very run down looking. Our journey started in the later afternoon of the summer, I would say probably after 5pm. There was still plenty of light, and it was humid. You could almost see the haze hanging over the corn and wild fields as we headed down a small hill. The street was lined with a lot of trees as you started to head down the hill past the farm house. These trees were over grown with vines and this created sort of a natural tunnel. As we walked along and our eyes adjusted we were all happy to encounter a pretty nice creek.

The creek was half surrounded by an electric fence. The creek was running through the middle of a small dairy cow pasture. I'm not sure how I managed to get down into the creek, but I did. The creek wasn't very long and I remember thinking that it really didn't "go" anywhere, there was no place for the creek to really go – in one direction the creek drew narrow quickly and wasn't really a creek anymore. The other direction towards the pasture actually was blocked by hanging wires from the electric fence.

While staring at these wires and standing in a creek – not the smartest move I'll admit – I heard my Mom yell to me a clipped but hushed voice "Michael, get out of that water right now and get up here". I remember looking up and starting to argue with her, but she cut me off quickly. "Michael, get up out of that water right now". I thought it was strange she really wouldn't look at me. I guessed she probably was worried about the electric fence, so I quickly scrambled up the bank of the creek to join her. As I got to the top she roughly jerked my arm and pulled me back towards the road. My little sister was doing better as at least she was still on her feet. The look on my Mom's face was, I wouldn't say sheer terror, but there was some fear in her eyes. They were locked onto someone in the distance, her jaw was clenched tight as she told me never to come down to that creek again. We were going home.

I tried to look back as we were being drug away, I thought I saw someone watching us from just at the edge of the pasture near the woods – I assumed at the time this was the farmer and he wasn't happy we were in his creek. I remember thinking that the guy was pretty tall and had long arms.


End file.
